Democrats delivered on a dream of a blue Texas, and they went farther than winning one Senate seat against a corrupt candidate. No, they won every major statewide race, including governor. They flipped the state House, and Democrat Senfronia Thompson might soon make history as the first Black woman speaker.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs won re-election in a rout, and now Democrats will control the legislature for the first time in 60 years.
And all this happened without Democrats following the Ezra Klein prescription for red-state success. In 2025, Klein told his then New York Times colleague Ross Douthat:
My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.
Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.
Texas Senator-elect James Talarico is not an anti-choice Democrat. Neither is Sherrod Brown, who’s returning to the Senate after flipping JD Vance’s former seat in Ohio. Dr. Amy Acton, the Ohio governor-elect, is openly pro-choice, and stated on her campaign site, for all to see, that as governor, she’d “protect reproductive freedom so that every woman can access safe, legal abortion care, contraception, fertility treatments, and miscarriage care. I will fight back at attempts to undermine Issue 1 and continue to protect and expand access to reproductive care for all Ohioans.”
Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa is pro-choice, as well, and while she doesn’t have the votes to outright repeal the state’s draconian abortion bans, she’ll use her executive authority to appoint new, saner leadership to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) and the Texas Medical Board. She never hid from her pro-abortion rights, pro-gun safety, pro-LGBTQ record as a Democratic state house representative, either.
Democratic Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson has already said he won’t sue out-of-state doctors who mail abortion pills to Texas residents — an immediately beneficial change from former Attorney General Ken Paxton’s anti-abortion policies.
Predictably, Klein has not yet admitted how wrong he was. Instead, he’s minimizing Angie Nixon’s performance in Florida. Pundits like Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, and Neera Tanden have responded to mainstream liberals winning “red state elections” in an interesting manner: They’re claiming they’re all “moderates.” The definition is a constantly shifting one, which seemingly excludes Angie Nixon and Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed while including South Carolina Senator-elect Dr. Annie Andrews and Texas Sen-Elect James Talarico, whose youth pastor demeanor might seem “moderate” but he frequently drops his share of economic populist truth bombs: “The reason poverty exists is not because we can’t feed the poor it’s because we can’t satisfy the rich,” Talarico said on the campaign trail.
The current backtrack argument claims that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were actually “conservative Democrats,” but Yglesias specifically defined “moderate” in 2021 as “‘somewhere between Joe Biden and Lisa Murkowski,’ i.e. the Manchin Zone.” Yglesias even suggested that liberals support a John Kasich independent Senate bid in Ohio because there was just no way an actual Democrats win in the state. He wrote, “come November 2022 … [Ohio voters will discover] they still think abortion should be illegal, still think businesses are often overregulated, and still think liberals underrate the case for widespread gun ownership.”
Gov-elect Acton and Senator-Again Brown demonstrated conclusively that voters, even in “red” states, are not so inelastic. They’ll support candidates who actually address their material concerns, rather than cynically catering to them on “culture war” issues.
Winning Democratic candidates across the country ran on what they genuinely believed and never ran away from themselves. They certainly didn’t get trapped in what Yglesias called the “Manchin Zone.” (Manchin himself endorsed a string of losing candidates.)
You could imagine Joe Manchin scolding Dr. Amy Andrews for her hilarious social media videos mocking Republicans. As a pediatrician, she opposes children dying from preventable illnesses, so she has repeatedly shredded Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA nonsense. Dr. Andrews ran against soon-to-be former Rep. Nancy Mace in 2022, but when she lost, she didn’t drastically moderate her positions so she could mount a statewide comeback. Instead, she kept hammering MAGA. In September 2024, Dr. Andrews posted on social media, “I mean this with every ounce of respect that you deserve, @JDVance FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF.” Later, when responding to an article that compared Vance’s favorability to herpes, Dr. Andrews wrote, “Herpes is forever. JD Vance doesn’t have to be.”
Last year, she trashed Vance’s racist xenophobic screed about illegal immigrants receiving emergency medical care: “Hey JD Vance.👋 You need to understand something. Physicians are never going to refuse emergency care to someone in an Emergency Department. No matter what you say behind that big boy podium. We’re not like you. We wake up every day to help people.”
She really doesn’t like this guy, which makes sense because he’s terrible. (Watch below.)
I especially enjoyed Dr. Andrews’s SNL-level parody of Sen. Katie Britt’s response to President Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address. (Watch below.)
Democrats truly in “Manchin Zone” would distance themselves from the national party and boast about the many issues where they actually agreed with Trump. The winning Democratic candidates this year didn’t do this. Unlike Manchin and Sinema, they went on the offensive against billionaires and corporate corruption, often naming and shaming Elon Musk. They also never went full Fetterman and bashed progressives on Fox News or Bill Maher.
Dr. Annie Andrews flipped my home town of Greenville, SC, for the first time since, well, ever, and her position on many key issues are indistinguishable from Elizabeth Warren and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She supports universal background checks and banning “weapons of war from our streets.” She described herself as an “gun safety enthusiast” and even posted on social media, “I hate the NRA.” She had “Black Lives Matter” in her 2021 Twitter bio. She had a liberal view on immigration, supporting a secure border but also a pathway to citizenship, and she even criticized ICE on the campaign trail: “What I’ve seen happen over the past couple of years with masked ICE agents ripping families apart, walking around hospitals and schools unbadged, throwing people into vans. It’s so deeply un-American, and I know we can do better.”
Senator-elect Andrews refuses to accept AIPAC money and expresses human empathy for the lives lost in Gaza. She’s a true new Democrat, and we can use more like her, especially if they don’t pay attention to Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein.
What I think Yglesias gets wrong is this idea that you can win over voters based on the stances you take, as though voters check off a list or a pro lifer would ever vote for even a pro life Democrat when a candidate from the prolife party is available. He also argues that candidates should stick to talking about issues that their party is strong on (for Dems, healthcare and education) and avoid topics they’re weak on (for Dems, immigration, crime). I think this misreads how voters actually think, particularly persuadable voters.
First, voters go with image more than substantive policy. No one is reading Jeb Bush or Liz Warren policy papers, they just see both of them as conservative or liberal respectively. Second, voters always want strength over weakness—a candidate who equivocates and seems to agree even a little with the opposition, or makes excuses for why they can’t do something, or talks in lawyerly mush is going to turn them off, compared to one who comes across like a steamroller ready to crush an enemy they despise (think Ossoff in debate with Collins). Third, voters can be moved more by how you argue for your issues than what position you take. Rather than avoid discussing transgender rights (because your party polls poorly on them), you may get more mileage with swing voters by saying “let people live their lives, what kind of freak is obsessed with other people’s genitals? Not the government’s business!” rather than “let me explain the medical science behind the sex you are born with and hey did you just fall asleep?”
Finally I had no idea Dr Andrews had such comedy chops! I hope she keeps this up.
As the Republican party has moved to the (extreme) right in the years since Reagan, Democrats have been moving to the *left* since 2016. The idea of what a "moderate" Democrat is now is essentially a mainstream liberal-Joe Manchin left the party over this, as you may recall. Thus, any Democrat not calling for open borders or defunding the police while staking out other more left wing positions can now credibly call themselves a moderate. This is what guys like Klein and Yglesias (and elected officials like my senator Angus King and embattled leader Schumer) really don't understand. I'm fine with candidates whose qualities reflect their specific electorates-they don't all have to be Bernie bros-which is how Adam Hamilton and James Talarico slayed the dragons in their states, but neither are really moderates in the old fashioned sense of the word. Whether that is good or bad is up for debate, but it's past time our pundits and politicians updated their worldview to fit the new realities.